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Through

David Herd

Through
10% off eBook (EPUB)
Categories: 21st Century, British
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (84 pages)
(Pub. Apr 2016)
9781784102562
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eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Apr 2016)
9781784102579
£7.99 £7.19
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  • Description
  • Excerpt
  • Author
  • Reviews
  • Today is pale. I’d like to make
    An intervention now please. Across
    The city the traffic never stops
    When the winds blow and the seas
    And the small rain arbitrates the
    Process and the waiting continues
    And the watching, I’d like to interrupt.



    from ‘Feedback (6)’

    The poems in Through resume David Herd’s inquiry into the language of public space taken up in All Just (2012). Here, five extended texts address the ways in which contemporary public language has been rendered officially hostile. Considering the risks that such official hostility poses to human intimacy, Through sets out to register broken affections, to re-explore possibilities of solidarity and trust. Countering the enclosures of public discourse, the poems embrace instead ‘a language in transition’, one in which meaning is multiple, ‘echoing into place a genuine and subsisting relationship’.
    David Herd is a poet, critic and teacher. He has given readings and lectures in Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, the USA and the UK, and his poems, essays and reviews have been widely published in magazines, journals and newspapers. His collections of poetry include All Just (Carcanet, 2012) and Outwith (Bookthug, ... read more
    Praise for David Herd '€˜One of the few truly necessary works of poetry written on either side of the Atlantic in the past decade.'
    Los Angeles Review of Books
    'In an era in which the relationship between poetry and politics is rarely subtle, the quiet but insistent linguistic and thematic complexities of All Just carry a rare quality and one that mark it out as that rare thing in the poetry marketplace: an important collection.'
    Nikolai Duffy, The Literateur
    'The difficulty of knowing "where one stands" both in space and affect, whether it requires particularising or details, whether one can choose where one stands, is perhaps the condition of being modern and is explored in All Just in a way that is resonant and haunting.'
    Ann Vickery, Mascara
       '...a tour de force display of wit and technique, terrific poem after terrific poem.'
    Poetry Review
      'a dizzy and disorienting chain of teasing, clever, breezy challenging, ingratiating, and infuriating poems...there are many poems here that will put a spring in your step, and make your mind dance.'
    Tower Poetry
    'jumbled and energetic, discursive or elliptical, chatty or terse, provocative but playful, haphazard but probing.'
    The Times
    'A scintillating first collection of poems.'
    Scotland on Sunday
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